your issue is a known one and it is not exactly related to SATA itself, but rather to some combination of SATA chipset and certain mobos.

Do you think I'm having problems because I'm using a SATA hard disk? Is disabling SATA and using an IDE hard disk likely to work for the time being?

Quote from: "MarcoZan"

The only thing I had to do was playing a bit with BIOS settings (disable anything that has to do with APIC), and use boot option like noapic nolapic.

At first look I can't see anything in the BIOS that mentions APIC (I assume you're talking about the interrupt controller).

If I boot with "linux26 noapic nolapic" it still freezes loading the sata_nv module

Quote from: "MarcoZan"

Googling around I've read that in some cases booting in expert mode and manually modprobing modules did the trick

Ooh, that sounds like fun!

Quote from: "MarcoZan"

please post some details about your hardware config, maybe other Pluto users could help you find a way out.

I'm using a K8 Triton series motherboard with an nForce4-4X chipset, and AMD64 processor, one SATA hard disk and one IDE hard disk. I also have an ATI X600 Pro graphics card.

The system runs fine under Ubuntu (apart from the graphics card which requires non free drivers to not crash unless I use vesa) and Debian Sarge seems to have problems with the built-in Ethernet and possibly SATA. As Pluto is based on Debian I guess that explains the problems with the motherboard.

Under "DCERouter Status" when I kill it when it freezes is says "Not responding on socket. Probably dead."

There's actually a lot of DCERouter errors, especially "devices" failing to load. Could all this be caused by a lack of network connection? There's a lot of network unreachable errors and Device 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 22, 24 fail to load (nearly all of them).

One thing I wasn't sure about in the installation options was that I told it to access to the Internet, even though I knew it can't find network drivers. The problem is going to be getting the network drivers!

* There are also Ubuntu and Windows XP installations on the hard disk, it recognised Ubuntu but not Windows

first of all I would try to install a standard Debian from an official ISO (i.e not Pluto ISO) and also to make a dist upgrade to kernel 2.6.15-2. This way you can find out whether your box actually can bear a Debian distro with SATA hd or not. This is what I made (and also other guys here did the same), and in my case Debian installer reached the end without a glitch.

Given this (let's suppose that your system can work with Debian Sarge + SATA) I would try the following:

1. install pluto using your IDE hd (disabling SATA disk)2. try to integrate your SATA disk to the system and see if this way you can use it (i.e if modules are loading without freezing up the box).3. if everything is ok try to copy your system from IDE disk to SATA disk and after playing a bit with grub try to boot your system from SATA disk and see what happen.

Actually this was my "B plan" in case my new mobo and my SATA disk were giving me this kind of troubles.

It's a rough idea, didn't go deeper in details/feasibility because in the end I didn't need it.

Please see my edits above. By disabling SATA I can get Pluto to install for the time being but now I have the problem that I don't have network drivers. Do you think all the problems with DCERouter are caused by this?

I will probably see if I can get anything working with plain Debian Sarge.

I've always wanted my home systems to be Debian based but before I found Pluto I was considering basing it on Ubuntu Server rather than Debian Sarge because Debian isn't really designed for cutting edge multimedia stuff, it's more for rock solid servers running file/mail/web services.

Has anyone had any success building Pluto on an Ubuntu base?

The ideal situation would be to use hardware compatible with Pluto but that's not really a great solution for me because I'm kind of stuck with what I've got for the time being.